JERUSALEM (AP) - With Prime Minister Ariel Sharon recovering from emergency brain surgery early Saturday, his doctors said it was still too early to assess how much damage the Israeli leader has suffered from a massive stroke. Independent experts said the prognosis remained grim. An official determination on Sharon's condition will likely take place on Sunday, when doctors plan to wean him off the drugs that are keeping him in what they said is a medically induced coma.Sharon, 77, underwent five hours of emergency brain surgery Friday that doctors said successfully stopped a hemorrhage and relieved swelling inside his skull. Doctors reported ``significant improvement,'' but said he remained in serious condition.
Sharon, who underwent seven hours of surgery following his stroke, was rushed back into the operating room Friday morning after a brain scan indicated rising cranial pressure and further brain hemorrhaging.
Hospital director Dr. Shlomo Mor-Yosef said the new surgery helped stabilize Sharon's condition. ``At the end of the operation, there is no active bleeding and the intracranial pressure has returned to normal.'' Mor-Yosef said a comparison of brain scans before and after the surgery showed ``significant improvement,'' but he did not elaborate.
The chief neurosurgeon operating on Sharon, Dr. Felix Umansky, said he came through the surgery well but was likely to have suffered damage. ``There is always some damage when you have cerebral hemorrhage,'' he said in a telephone interview. ``We cannot assess the damage because he is under anesthesia all the time. We need to wait and see what will happen once we reduce the medication which keeps him under sedation.''
Hospital officials said Sharon would remain in the medically induced coma until at least noon Sunday to give him time to heal.
The bleeding and swelling treated Friday, while not unexpected, are life-threatening complications that make the prospect of survival ever slimmer, said Dr. Anthony Rudd, a stroke specialist at St. Thomas' Hospital in London. ``It sounds like a last desperate attempt to salvage something, but the prognosis must now be terrible,'' he said. Noting that a CT scan shows the structure - not the function - of the brain, Rudd said the improvement that Sharon's doctors referred to likely applies to the reduction of swelling seen in the earlier scan.